


Seven Turns Stranded

by skaralding



Category: Naruto
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dark Comedy, Dimension Travel, F/F, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Fuuinjutsu, Jutsu Gone Wrong, M/M, Multi, No Uchiha Massacre, Reincarnation, Reincarnation Loop, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:15:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21932821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skaralding/pseuds/skaralding
Summary: Itachi’s attempt at making things right through the abuse of time-travel seals goes very, very poorly, but not in the way you’d think. (Abandoned.)
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Uchiha Itachi/Original Character(s), Uchiha Itachi/Original Female Character(s), Uchiha Itachi/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 50





	1. Turn One: Alpha

**Author's Note:**

> So I am now once again the proud owner of three WIPs!!! I started posting this one on FFA a while ago, and have just decided to buckle up and archive the first couple chapters since they're done, along with maybe the extras while I post them on meme.
> 
> This story is high on plot (though still a basic one cos that's how I roll) and very low on porn. The A/B/O tag is on it even though that's mostly just the first arc. I'll leave a note in the relevant chapter if I decide to add tags/warnings for any new weird shit I end up adding, though afaik this story is going to keep being straightforward angst. Please note that Itachi is not going to have much, if any direct interaction with the canon plot; this is almost entirely about his trying to undo the bad decision to time travel without a license.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Itachi wakes up with a headache.

Of all the things Itachi expected to see after he initiated the final reaction within the huge, blood-drenched time-travel seal, his mother’s half-worried, half-annoyed expression was not one of them.

“Hahaue…” he breathed, and wondered why his head was aching so fiercely.

“You,” Mother said, a small furrow forming between her brows, “can’t you find a better way to handle this?”

Even as she said that, she was drawing back from him, retreating back toward the open door of what looked a lot like his old bedroom. “You’re the heir, Itachi,” she said, firmly, the words familiar, her impatient tone as she said them… not. “ _I_ won’t make arrangements for you, I know better than that. But don’t be surprised if the elders butt in on your behalf, and don’t expect me to shield you.”

Itachi, his headache a vice, his memories churning uselessly, opened his mouth to ask just what she was talking about, only to be stopped short by a few words.

“You’re already twenty-three,” Mother said, directing a sharp glance at him over her shoulder. “ _Not_ choosing someone is the same as letting someone else choose for you. Alright?”

“What…?” _Twenty-three?_ His calculations had clearly, no, _specifically_ aimed for as near as he could get to the time of his birth, but he was _twenty-three_?? How in god’s name could such a huge error—

“And for goodness’ sake, stop drinking with Shisui! Or if you insist on it, don’t keep trying to match that bottomless barrel of a boy, and only drink as much as you can handle, okay?” Then, when Itachi just kept on staring, Mother rolled her eyes and stepped back. “Sasuke? Are you _still_ not packed?”

At some point in that shocking torrent of information, Itachi somehow managed to sit up despite his piercing headache. Now, watching his mother stride off out of sight, worrying at a disconcertingly loud volume about whether Sasuke was really _really_ ready to go on such a long, pivotal mission, Itachi found himself sinking back down onto his back, and pulling the blanket up until it was almost right beneath his chin.

He told himself he was just taking a moment to regroup, but he knew he was hiding.

* * *

Hiding wasn’t something he could get away with for very long, not after Mother had harangued and nagged Sasuke all the way out of the house. Itachi didn’t know what to make of her, of this woman who looked so much like his mother, and yet acted so carelessly. After Sasuke had escaped—and yes, Itachi hid from him too, only daring to nod at him when he looked into the bedroom to grunt something unintelligible as a goodbye—‘Mother’ came right back to Itachi’s room to give him a narrow-eyed, considering look.

“I’ll get up soon,” he said, unable to help himself. “I just need a few more minutes.”

The slight, grudging nod Mother gave him was painfully familiar; the way she sighed afterwards was not.

The way she came in again, to cross her arms in front of her and stand there looming by his bedside, was _definitely_ not the kind of thing Itachi remembered from his past life. “I said I’ll get up,” he found himself saying, shifting uneasily beneath the blanket. “You don’t need to wait here and watch me.”

“Hn,” Mother said, and at least that politely disbelieving tone was familiar, even though he didn’t remember her ever directing it at _him_. That tone was for Father when he was glossing over something in conversation, or for Sasuke when he was pretending he’d eaten his carrots and not stuffed them into his pockets. “If you’re late for your shift…”

“I won’t be,” Itachi said, emphatically, as if he knew what she was talking about. As if his brain wasn’t still too full of the words ‘twenty-three’ to really begin to process anything else. “I promise, Mother.”

“If you’re late for your shift,” Mother said, ignoring him entirely, “I’ll let Chieko-obasan know that you won’t mind meeting her daughter on the weekend.”

Itachi didn’t remember Chieko-obasan’s daughter. He remembered seeing That Man pulling his blade out of Chieko-obasan’s sputtering, frowning almost-corpse, but he didn’t remember a daughter.

“And,” Mother said, with the slight smile that said she meant business, “I’ll even tell Taki-san that his nephew’s welcome to come over that weekend as well. How about it? You can meet him on a Saturday, and Chizuru-chan on Sunday. What do you think?”

“I’m getting up,” Itachi said, hoping he didn’t sound too desperate. “I’ll get up right now.”

* * *

A week later, as Itachi moped his way through the unending monotony of a shift in the call box nearest to the Hyuuga compound, he _still_ wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. Oh, he’d gone through his calculations, drawing and redrawing the seal and its components on scrap paper, checking every referent and every assumption, but as far as he could tell, it should have worked.

He should have been a baby, or, at worst, a toddler. He should have been biding his time, making plans, setting the stage for the drastic actions he’d planned to take. Instead…

“Afternoon, Itachi-san,” an older woman said, as she passed by his call box, and he smiled and murmured something appropriate automatically before really looking at her and noticing the white eyes that made her a Hyuuga. “Just one more hour left, correct?”

“Yes,” Itachi said, wishing he knew just what it was that had made her pause in front of his call box, clearly looking to chat. “Ah, Hyuuga-obasan—”

“Always so polite! Shouldn’t it be Ruka-san, at least?”

“Ah, then, Ruka-obasan—”

“Anyway, you’re coming to the luncheon this weekend, right? Fugaku said you’d be off shift on Sunday evening.”

It took everything, every effort Itachi had ever spent on learning to conceal his emotions, for him not to react to that blisteringly casual ‘Fugaku’. “Unfortunately, Ruka-obasan, I’m probably going to be at the hospital then.”

“Oh, I completely forgot you were still doing that! You poor thing, how’s it going?”

He wished he knew. His memories—the memories of the Itachi he replaced—were all extremely difficult to make sense of. Looking through them felt like wading through bitter, pungent syrup. “It’s going well, Ruka-obasan,” he said. “I appreciate your concern.”

“Always so polite,” she said again, still smiling. Then the veins at the side of her eyes pulsed, and it took all Itachi had not to flinch, because he was _not used_ to just standing there in front of a Hyuuga whose eyes were active, it was dangerous—“At least it looks like your yin imbalance is finally starting to clear up.”

“It does?” He felt trapped in this wretched call box. Trapped, by a slowly blinking older woman a head shorter than him, whose hand was shaking slightly when her eyes deactivated and her veins relaxed. “No need to strain yourself on my account, Ruka-san.”

“Ah,” she said, waving her still-shaking hand. “Not taking a closer look at a fine young alpha whenever I have the chance, _that_ would be the real shame.”

Alpha? Was that some special jonin designation that his frantic attempts at getting up to speed with this off-kilter world had missed? But she was smiling slyly, and so Itachi smiled too, being sadly familiar with the phenomenon of being buttered up by an older woman.

“As you were,” Hyuuga Ruka said, grandeur in the flick of her hand, and the slow, steady steps that began to take her away from him. “Give my regards to Mikoto, dear, for the senbei she sent.”

“I will, Ruka-san.” But the first thing he did once his shift was over would be to head to the library and try not to look too suspicious while trying to find what he’d missed.

* * *

The library’s updated jonin training regulations and codes of conduct were no help to him; the differences he found between what he remembered and what was present in the library texts only raised more questions. He’d assumed the much-reduced scale of previous Shinobi World Wars were the reason why there existed mandatory three-week holidays for every six months’ worth of active duty. He’d assumed the stringent rules for safeguarding the dignity (it was worded just like that) of prisoners of war were also a follow-on consequence of the much less desperate conflicts between all the hidden villages.

Frowning, Itachi switched his focus to history, and was immediately struck by a sudden, glaring fact: Uzushiogakure was—it _was_. It existed, still.

More than that, it was _the_ premier powerhouse, and every mention of its many alliances and intermarriages with other hidden villages than Konoha was either resentful—kages with strong family ties to Uzushio were very obviously envied—or haughty, in the case of marriages or treaties signed with minor, less influential Uzushio clans. The Uzumaki, according to the textbooks, were neither too high nor too low in the pecking order in Uzushio. Becoming Hokage, though obviously about accumulating political acumen and strength, also seemed to hinge on whether or not the individual seeking that honourable post could wangle a marriage with a prominent Uzumaki jonin.

It made absolutely no sense. Uzushio was. And Kiri—as far as he could tell— _also_ was, was there, sans a terrible history of bloodline purges. Which said something, which made Itachi flip immediately to the earlier sections of the textbook, because—

_Uzumaki Mito, Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara were married in lawful, balanced triad, year of 18–._

Married. In lawful, balanced triad.

Itachi’s head was hurting now. Had possibly been hurting, as soon as he sat down with this history textbook, but it didn’t stop him from reading on, from taking in more and more confusing words and realizing more and more confusing things. There seemed to be no mention at all of the bijuu, as if they had never existed. The children of the members of Konoha’s founding couple, no, _triad_ , all took the Uzumaki name. Soon after the founding, there was an especially bloody rebellion—the omega rebellion—and laws against fertility testing and recording of reproduction status were put in place.

At this point, Itachi was starting to think he’d have been better served by an Academy-level textbook, the simpler the better. He was almost sure ‘reproduction status’ didn’t mean what he thought it should mean. He did not think he understood why it had been an issue in the rebellion at all. Surely your fertility was your own private business. Or it was family business, clan business, nothing much to do with the village except on a large scale, as related to general trends in the population.

Yet there had been a rebellion, and the end result was that fertility testing was only done once, and was strictly optional, and that it was now a misdemeanour to inquire about someone’s reproduction status without going through proper channels.

Tired, confused, reeling from information overload and something else he didn’t want to look too closely at, Itachi finally shut the textbook in front of him, and rose to put it away. He walked home in a pensive, melancholy haze, frustrated beyond measure.

The worst thing about it all was the fact that, frustrated as he was, he couldn’t help but feel disgustingly relaxed. The evening was just cool enough that his KMPF uniform didn’t feel like a burden. People nodded politely to him on the streets, but no one tried to stop him for a talk, perhaps because he’d doffed his flak jacket on the way to the library, and that was enough signal that he was off duty that no one would bother him unless it was urgent.

Even the air smelled different here. Like cooking meat and spices—dinner time already—and the dense, pungent odour of rotting leaves. He would have thought himself in a dream if it weren’t so very boring and routine, screaming _normalcy_ to him in a way that kept him tense, because he didn’t remember the last time anything had felt normal.

He didn’t remember the last time he’d felt so safe.

* * *

The hospital checkup was strange. The scent of the place hit him hard, unfamiliarly harsh, as if the spray cleaner and bleach that they used to scrub the floors had just been recently used.

“Uchiha Itachi?” The nurse who’d spoken was smiling a little too much, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his heated brown gaze a palpable weight on Itachi’s skin. “If you’ll come this way, I can handle your check-up.”

Itachi would have much preferred to turn around and walk right out the front doors, but he knew he couldn’t. He was a jonin. He was temporarily assigned to the police force. If he had ever flirted with this young man—and some instinct he didn’t understand told him he most definitely had—it would be extremely suspicious if he were to turn tail and run right now.

Following the nurse made him feel… strange. He’d rarely focused on anyone so acutely before, not without facing them in a spar, a battle, a fight, and yet he found himself cataloguing the young man walking before him, the man he was quite sure was swinging his hips like that on purpose, as well as running a slightly pale, lightly calloused hand through his long, well-treated brown hair.

That was another thing Itachi didn’t understand: the hair. It had taken him two days to pin down what was bothering him so much about the appearance of everyone he looked at, all until he forced himself to look at Father during that day’s stilted dinner, and realized with an inward start that Father’s hair was, was _long_. Was well past shoulder length, and bafflingly well cared for.

Father, whose very last concern had been his appearance, and who had looked tired, stubbly and cross at that dinner, all except for the hair.

A moment of thought had conjured to him the brief sight of Sasuke’s long, spiky ponytail, glimpsed and dismissed in favour of trying to calculate just what had gone wrong in the base matrices of the time travel seal. Mother’s hair was long too—longer than he remembered. And Itachi had never cared to cut his own hair, had had so many other concerns that he simply hadn’t questioned why it would be long here as well, long enough that pulling it back into a neat ponytail was easy.

“You haven’t been to see me lately,” the nurse said, startling Itachi out of his disordered thoughts. “Are you tiring of me already?”

_I don’t even know your name,_ Itachi thought, so very uncomfortable that he briefly considered saying it, rude and hurtful and unwise as it would be. “You said you would handle my check-up?” he said instead, his voice even, his expression polite, both adding up to an unspoken, but much less rude dismissal. “I’ve an appointment to keep, afterwards; I’d appreciate it if we could make this quick.”

“Oh, you wound me,” the nurse said, with a brief, melting look back in his direction. “You’re as heartless as ever.” Thank goodness. Itachi wasn’t at all sure what he would have done if it had been made clear that the opposite was expected. “Come on, then, sit down.” They had turned the corner and walked into an empty examination room a moment ago; now, despite his exaggeratedly tragic expression, the nurse seemed prepared to be professional. “Now, let’s take a look…”

This was not familiar, at least not recently so, the sight of someone with green-glowing hands and an obvious determination to pry into his health. The hands touched lightly to the sides of Itachi’s head, and the intrusion of the medical chakra was even lighter. The nurse had a very delicate touch, probing each tenketsu in Itachi’s head with only the slightest brush. “ _Much_ better,” the nurse murmured. “Shockingly better, I’d say, though there’s still the old imbalance, and a bit of congestion on the right side of your brain. Have you been sleeping well, lately?”

“No,” Itachi lied, because even though he’d had all the usual bloody dreams, they’d never got alarming enough to jolt him awake. The worst events had seemed almost dulled, as if they were happening to someone else. “I’ve had nightmares.”

“Have they woken you?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Nothing new, then? I believe I remember your file saying something about that, about new dreams upsetting your balance enough to wake you up, whenever they occur.”

Just like that, something split, a thin skein of unreality tearing away from Itachi’s weary thoughts. He looked at the slightly absentminded nurse before him, and he _knew his name_. “Kensuke-san…?”

“Yes?”

Itachi had probably (never?) borne worse pain than this. But he was in a hospital, and though the nurse—Ken-san—had long since pulled away and turned his attention to writing notes on his clipboard, it seemed prudent for Itachi to bring his sudden, head-splitting headache to the man’s attention. “My head—”

Orange lightning poured across his vision. Stars. Memories that expanded and compacted themselves like a hungry whirlwind. A hand on his head, a shout that hurt to hear—“he’s having a _fit_ —”

Blackout.

* * *

_I’m…_

“’Ta-nii, swing!”

_He’s…_

“…congratulations, Itachi. To think, tokubetsu at thirteen, full jonin at fifteen…”

_Was I ever tokubetsu?_

“…the pride of our clan.” Fugaku. Father. “An alpha for all your peers, for all the _village_ to look up to.” There was that word again, and it meant— “Now, you know we don’t expect you engaged next year, but the year after _that_ , perhaps…”

It figured, Itachi thought, muzzily, that even this softer, more satisfied version of Fugaku would try and put pressure on him. Though, well, if it was only about getting married—

“You’ve never even hinted at who you might like!” Mother, frustrated, but with an undercurrent of laughter in her tone despite it all. “Does no one appeal to you? Can you at least say whether you’d want a beta, or perhaps an omega?”

Those _words_.

“Yin imbalance.” In the memories, the Itachi there had always felt himself to be somewhat detached. “Should improve naturally with time.” Who was that, and why did they sound so strangely familiar, and yet so— “Meditation, obviously, and if he starts seeing funny things, you’ll want to point him at the nearest Yamanaka immediately. Treating this sort of thing is their speciality, not mine.”

“We are in your debt, Tsunade-sama.” Mother again, and _that_ was why the earlier voice had been familiar, despite its almost fussy tone. “Itachi-kun, say thank you.”

He saw her now, in the stretched frame of the memory, a tall, curvy giant that smelled like green oranges and something dry and papery. Blonde. Arrogant. “Thank you, Tsunade-sama.”

In his memory, Tsunade-sama smirked at him, and he had promptly burst into huge, wracking sobs. Mother had been beside herself; Tsunade-sama had inched forward a step, her brow furrowed, her slightly glowing hand outstretched. “Yin fluctuation,” she’d said. “Has this ever happened before?”

_She’s always been this strong,_ Itachi had wanted to say, _and yet, I’ve never seen her look so—so_ **happy** _._ But he had been crying too hard to get anything out, and he hadn’t wanted to upset Mother any more than he already had. He didn’t like the way this weird island smelled; he wanted to go home.

He’d sulked the entire time Mother had kept him there, forced to sit through test after test, scolded now and then about how he needed to stop frowning at everyone. How just being allowed on the island to speak to Uzumaki Tsunade-sama, the genius healer, was an honour.

He hadn’t been back there to visit again, save for the occasional C- or B-rank that took his team all the way out to Whirlpool Country. He certainly had not seen Tsunade-sama again, or been allowed to sit in her daughter’s lap and play with loopy chakra strings while Tsunade argued with her other daughter over whether a yang infusion would do him any good.

His head ached, but in a distant, almost soothing way. More memories drilled through him, swallowed him, poured through his muddled brain, clashing with old (new?) ones. He remembered what an alpha was.

_“But, niisan,” Sasuke snarled, “ **she** growled at me **first** —”_

He remembered he was an alpha.

_“Posturing that way is for children, Sasuke. Not for shinobi. Which are you?”_

Itachi had rarely bothered to growl at anyone. People who resorted to that, people that gloried too much in acting like they were only one step up from being animals, were a headache to deal with. Action said more than growls.

It had always taken a week or so for new teammates to understand that his refusal to engage in the usual posturing didn’t mean he’d take any insults lying down. Konohan Uchiha never needed to be taught that lesson, having received their fair share of broken arms and senbon-riddled legs while growing up, but the branch clans from Suna and Uzushio were a whole different story.

His one formal reprimand had come about because of one such clash. A semi-important diplomatic mission to Kirigakure had had him feeling even more tense than usual. The balmy, humid weather had grated on him. The unfamiliar layout of the village had bothered him, along with the stink of salt in the air, and the snarling smiles and sneers from Suna-bronzed Uchiha, nearly every one of their scents rudely heavy with the reek of alphas.

_If one more of them gets in my way,_ Itachi remembered thinking, _I’m going to—_ And there he always stopped, because he’d been through enough excruciating sessions with Yamanaka Inoko that he knew when he was starting to have an episode, starting to plan a needless, pointless murder.

Murder was largely unnecessary (here), and it pained Itachi to drift through the many memories where he (the bloodthirsty alpha) had to remind himself of that over and over again.

Things had blown up anyway, necessitating an informal duel (really. They had duels?), one where Itachi had taken a sick sort of joy in carving lines up and down his opponent’s limbs, stripping and wounding the other boy simultaneously without ever letting him land so much as a scratch. The other boy’s eyes had sprouted an extra tomoe each just from sheer terror, and Itachi had licked his lips and told him it wouldn’t be enough.

Uncle Obito had been the one to drag Itachi away.

Uncle _Obito_. Who he’d never wanted to like, but who had always been unfailingly kind to him, though just as manipulative as Itachi had expected he would be.

Obito had been very disappointed in him, but had put in a word for him with the Yondaime Hokage all the same.

Somehow, that was where the memories calmed, where they finally slowed down, settling into a sensible, understandable order. Too many of them, still, and one large part of them almost too poisonous to touch, but at least they were no longer forcing themselves to the fore, blowing in and fading out of his conscious mind like flares.

“Itachi?”

Inoko. Yamanaka Inoko’s familiar voice, sounding as unflappable as ever.

“Are you feeling more organized?”

“Yes.” A lie, of course; ‘organized’ was the wrong word for what he was feeling. He felt _lost_ , and angry, so angry, and though he—the old, the former, detached, hair-trigger alpha him—finally understood just what was behind all that wordless anger, he still felt unbalanced.

But of course, that was his fault. And nothing he could currently fix, if he didn’t want to forget anything, didn’t want to lose the hidden parts that made him what he was.

“Good, Itachi. Follow the sound of my voice…”

A Mind Retrieval, something he was only vaguely familiar with in the last life, but sadly used to here. Itachi stood—floated?—for one, terrifying, miserable instant, and thought of what it would feel like to ignore Inoko-san just this once.

Then he shook himself and began to move forward.

* * *

Itachi didn’t need to be told how to live the rest of his new—ish—life. He nodded along, companionably, when Inoko-san emphasized again and again that he needed do nothing, prove nothing, that all he owed the world was within the hammered-out lines of the shinobi code, and that sometimes he didn’t even owe the world that.

“You are worthwhile as you are,” she liked to say. “Married, unmarried, on or off the force, etcetera.” And then his recovered memories would fill the rest of her impassioned speech in for him, from the one time he’d broken down in her office and had to be held like a child and told, in laborious detail, why there was nothing at all wrong with him for not choosing to be seconded to the KPMF at that point in his career.

He still felt guilty. Lost. But it grew easier to cope, the rhythm of daily life wrapping around him, small disputes and silly family quarrels and gossip in the jonin lounge hammering it into him that his life, this life, was real, and had an unmistakeable claim on him.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have been so easily settled if his past life had clawed its way to the fore much earlier on, say, when he’d just made jonin, or even tokubetsu. Perhaps he would have fled from Konoha and found the same old cave north of the border of Wave Country, and poured everything he had into _fixing his mistake_.

His mistake, which, as far as he could tell, entailed him having possibly gone down the wrong path when tearing through the ruins of Uzushio in Naruto’s wake. For the first few years after his full reawakening, Itachi struggled with the urge to, if not try again, then at least work his way high enough into the good graces of the Konohan Sealing Corps that he might be able to swing a pass to the main Sealing Library in Uzu. He had no illusions about whether he’d see anything useful; he was quite certain that anything relating to spatial and temporal manipulation was about as restricted as possible. But he wanted to at least _try_ , wanted to see if the foundational texts made helpful references, or if a pattern emerged from what they did and didn’t say was possible.

Then he got married to Kensuke—the nurse—and those half-thought plans receded to the back of his mind, and never quite moved forward again. They didn’t have a typical relationship, but it worked somehow; Ken-nii (“you don’t _look_ older than me,” Itachi had said, and Ken had grinned as if he’d won something from that admission) was a very undemanding sort of person. He wished to warm Itachi’s bed and have Itachi provide back rubs, massages and a listening ear when he complained about stupid or annoying patients at the hospital. Everything else seemed to be more or less optional.

Still, Itachi had wound in close around him, so attentive and so caring that Ken’s co-workers liked to complain about it. Ken retaliated by joking about how Itachi had imprinted on him like a newborn chick after his Yin imbalance forcefully corrected itself that one, frightening afternoon, and though that wasn’t far off from what had actually happened, Ken didn’t seem to mind it.

Children were a necessity, one Itachi dreaded until a few years into having had them. By then, the relentless grind of keeping their two girls from biting everything in sight had overshadowed his creeping anxiety that becoming a father would trigger something, force something awful to happen.

Just after Azusa made genin, and a year or so after Keiko had done the same, there was a rebellion in Kiri, and that seemed to kick off a period of nearly war-like global unrest. But, just as Itachi was starting to run on fumes and fear and the old, ever-present rage, things began to go back to what he’d started to think of as ‘normal’. When he put in his request to be taken off the active duty ANBU roster, the Yondaime asked him, in a disconcertingly worried tone, if he had fallen ill, but had still signed off on the request.

There were other flare-ups, other periods of unrest. Itachi weathered them better and better and better. When Azusa was forced to retire as a hunter-nin due to losing fine control in her extremities, Itachi weathered that too. When Keiko refused to marry anyone other than a scowling Suna Uchiha, Itachi sighed and made the best of it.

His lungs still ended up being what killed him. Ken wept and raged and cursed him and wept again, unsurprisingly unappreciative of Itachi’s hoarse jokes about how it was only fair, since he’d managed to trick his way into an extra fifty-odd years already.

(Inoko was the only one Itachi had ever fully explained that particular, well-worn joke to, and he’d only done so when she herself was on her deathbed.)

Itachi passed quietly, painlessly, with his family— _all_ his family—around him.

He was understandably perturbed to wake again, and look down and find that his hands were once again not quite as he’d remembered them.


	2. Turns Two Through Six: Transitions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Itachi endures. Shun becomes a scourge. Ageha lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ANGST TRUCK BACKIN UP~

This time, Itachi was not an alpha. He spent his first three coherent years inwardly debating just what in all the gods’ names had gone wrong enough that sacrificing himself to _one_ seal had somehow forced him into _two_ different fucking lives.

He didn’t last long in that life. He was too angry, too upset by the worrying implications, too everything, and so, when ninja (or perhaps just hired thugs, his chakra sense in this body was too shit to tell) burst in on his and his whiny older sister’s room one night, Itachi deliberately got in the way.

Killed one, maimed the other, and all with just an ear-piercing series of shrieks, shrieks that came with the unpleasant side effect of overloading his chakra pathways.

His sister bit down on her own shrieks, cried hysterically over his convulsing body, and before Itachi faded out, he couldn’t help but want to frown at himself. _You could have picked a better occasion,_ he thought, as the pain carried him far from himself. _You don’t need to make a habit of traumatizing your siblings._

* * *

The next time, Itachi awoke as a sleepy, lazy girl. A girl who babbled unintelligently at him in his (their?) head, and kept him as a careful secret from Inoichi-nii and Tousan, because he told good stories and always had helpful advice, and he’d taught her how to screen him under the moving, leaping pathways of her glowing mindscape.

He couldn’t help her as much as he would have liked. Roles were not a thing here, and the little he could glean from Kotone’s careful snooping put them in an awkward spot in Konoha’s history. He didn’t know how to be a girl, didn’t know how to do more than perform a surface-level impersonation of an adult woman, so he settled for teaching her everything useful he could think of. He nudged her towards medical ninjutsu and genjutsu (the traditional paths for kunoichi, for the sake of better camouflage), argued her into being simply gifted rather than being any kind of genius, and hoped for the best.

He didn’t know how they caught Danzo’s attention. All he knew was that, one day, Yamanaka Kotone woke up in an unfamiliar room (to her), and was told she could make a great contribution to Konoha. She laid low, terrified half by the methods of those who had snatched up her and three other wide-eyed, excited civilian boys, and half by Ita-nii’s terrible silence.

It was a few, hard days before he could bear to tell her—as if she really needed to be told—what she was probably in for. What the man that owned her now would likely do with her. How best to get away, and how he would take over whenever she needed it, to get them through the worst.

Kotone ‘mhmed’ through his rapid, careful explanations, seeming to agree, seeming too scared to do otherwise, only to tear apart Danzo’s mind the next time they saw him. In the ensuing chaos, three poisoned senbon found their way into her lower arm, and she had to have him help her cut it off to keep the poison from spreading, then cauterize the wound. By the time real ANBU were on the scene, she was cracked and breaking apart in their mind, because Danzo was her second kill and she’d had to do it and she’d made Itachi kill Akio-kun even though she knew it would hurt him, and she was _missing half an arm_ , her fingernails would never be even now.

Itachi didn’t know what else happened, because blackness covered the both of them when an ANBU in an eagle mask came upon their hiding place, and the next thing he saw when he woke was the side of yet another crib.

* * *

Itachi made for a terrible baby in that life. When he woke one day, only to feel the lights of the people around him began to dim and shudder and go out one by one, he was relieved.

It felt wrong to be a girl without Kotone.

* * *

After that short life, there was a strange, drawn-out in-between period. _Let me die,_ Itachi said to it, after what felt like an eternity.

He wasn’t expecting an answer.

He certainly wasn’t expecting that answer to be a pulse in the nothingness, a pulse that became a steady drum, that smelt-tasted-felt like the seal he’d drawn in that long-ago cave, with an empty, aching heart and a vicious desire to _make things right_.

 _I can’t,_ he tried to say, to the may-be-a-seal-matrix pouring—forcing—him back to life, but it didn’t listen.

* * *

So, the next time Itachi woke, he sucked on his thumb and _planned_. Clearly he had done something to upset some sort of cycle; clearly he had to fix it. He would fix it, or he would keep being reborn and reborn and ruining his (their?) life in fun new ways.

It felt unfair to have to plan, to have to push his small, ungainly body through careful stretches. If ROOT had been unfair, if The Order had been unfair, if the way he’d been forced to tear a gaping hole in his heart in his first (remembered) life had been unfair, then this…? This was _monstrously_ unfair, this was the god of unfair, the beginning and the end of unfair, the fucking _pinnacle_ of unfair.

The unfairest thing of all was the growing certainty that he had probably been the one to do this to himself.

This life, he was not an alpha. He was (thankfully) not an Uchiha. He was male, which wasn’t so much a comfort as it was a crutch for his mind, which kept twisting in on itself to find Kotone and wouldn’t give up until he felt down between his legs and reminded himself why they were no longer a they.

He didn’t have parents, this time. Which made some things easier, and some things annoyingly hard. The matron that cared for the five children in his small, creaky, traditionally-built home had no energy to spare on keeping more than an absent eye on him, and seemed not to think anything of the fact that all his childish scrawls were symbols and referents and other building blocks for basic seals.

He found out, a little too late, why the matron’s unconcern was not a good thing. Not because of Danzo, or because of some other troublesome ninja wanting a fresh, talented, moldable weapon.

“Uzushio,” the matron whispered to him, to him and his four wide-eyed not-really-siblings. Then she showed them all how to find the spiral seal on the heel of their right feet, and how to work out which family they belonged to from the pattern the seal was surrounded in.

Take-kun’s seal was the largest, the most elaborate. He was an Uzumaki, and born for great things.

Yoko-chan, Ume-chan and Aoi-chan were, respectively, of the Akamine, Teshima and Soga clans. Who were, if not quite as high up as the Uzumaki, weren’t nobodies.

Itachi—no, Shun-kun, he had to remember—was the only one lacking a last name, a clan name. Which by default meant that he would take the name Higashi, since he had apparently been born east of the main settlement, in a dozy seaside hamlet where Uzu-affiliated ninja sometimes stopped to lay down burdens or pick up orders.

Just that fact alone pointed to his having been born further back in the past than could possibly be useful, or even survivable. _Of course I’d only be born with a guaranteed in to Uzushio’s libraries before they even exist,_ Shun thought, letting none of his consternation show on his face. _How utterly unlucky._

Incredibly, despite everything, that life turned out to be his longest yet. Higashi Shun went from a too-quiet young recruit to the island’s second official chunin. Then he dropped off the radar, buried in seal research and espionage and anything that caught his fancy.

One of those things was Kirigakure, which viewed the far-reaching influence of Uzushio’s small, similarly water-bounded hidden village as a clear and present threat to Kiri’s continued existence. That Uzu kept itself almost aggressively neutral except as demanded by its marriage alliance with Konoha only seemed to intensify Kirigakure’s need to take action against them.

It didn’t help that, even without Shun’s paranoia and his secret years of experience in closing down avenues to infiltration, Uzushio was an exceedingly tough nut for a spy to crack without a high chance of being exposed for what they were. The clans of Uzu were tight-knit and insular, keeping a hard hold of the sealing techniques they passed down to their descendants. Most of the other hidden villages settled for planting obvious civilian contacts and gathering or exchanging information that way, but Kiri, perhaps due to their well warranted pride in their ability to insert agents here and there, kept on stubbornly trying to establish someone in Uzushio’s ninja hierarchy.

“Kirigakure must be contained,” Shun finally said, when the issue was raised in a council meeting. “I vote for strong, repressive action.”

Everyone agreed with the basic premise that they had to do something; no one agreed just what exactly should be done. They had hooks into the pirates that plied the seas in and around Water Country, but someone argued that direct action would leave a better impression. And then there was the incessant debate on just what kind of direct action would work best, and would still leave Uzushio out of the political mire that was the never-ending struggle between the daimyos.

Shun, annoyed by the vacillation of his fellow ninja, kept a stronger watch on his agents in Kiri, and went back into splitting his time between barrier research and the the theory of seal polarity. He’d thought allowing them a little more time to make a decision wouldn’t mean much in the scheme of things.

He’d thought wrong.

For three years, afterwards, Shun was well aware that a certain part of him had gone offline, withered out of existence by the indiscriminate death, the culling he’d failed to prevent. He’d felt no joy as he stood in the crumbling remnants of Kirigakure, just a hollow satisfaction, and the thought, _Kumo next._

He only stumbled across the slight, but unmistakeable hints of Danzo’s hand in Uzushio’s fall by accident. After that, it had been impossible to continue his restless wandering, his probing strikes, his investigation into what he could do that would hurt Kumogakure most, would _wound_ them the way he had been wounded.

Strangling Danzo to death with his own two hands was immensely harmful for his mental health. For some shaky moments, he didn’t know who he was, but knew _where_ he was, knew it like he knew the burn in his lungs that had resulted from too much smoke inhalation.

He walked ROOT’s sealed halls for two nights, disabling and killing and looking, though he knew he probably shouldn’t, for signs of the presence of a girl that might not yet have even been born. What finally woke him up was the moment of eerie silence that greeted him when he emerged from the main tunnel entrance.

Sunlight warmed him. He tilted his head up, luxuriating in the familiar heat of it on what little of his skin was exposed. A glance at the tense ninja surrounding him further centred him, supporting him in the realization that he was—Shun was once again in a sticky situation of his own making.

It didn’t hurt as much anymore to recognize too few faces. One pale, drawn face attracted his attention more than others: Orochimaru. _Too young_ , Shun told himself, even as he looked a little too long at the stripling that would become one of the men he hated most in the world for what he’d done to Sa—Se—

“No names,” Shun mumbled to himself. And then added, when it looked like Hiruzen was preparing to summon something to squash him: “This one counts their blood feud with Shimura Danzo as permanently resolved.”

“Uzumaki-san,” Hiruzen said, in a stony, uncompromising tone, “I do not recall your being granted passage into the village.”

“This one’s ties to that line perished with Uzushio,” Shun said, bluntly. Probably, they wouldn’t believe him, but that was their problem, not his. Oh, except for one thing: “Even so, this one’s heart still beats with the blood of those from that dead place. None of those who spill that blood unjustly will be permitted to live.”

Hopefully, the tense silence that met that statement meant that they’d take it seriously. If they didn’t… Shun would be a little sad, but he’d still tear them apart with the energies of the land they had built on. He’d already destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed, two hidden villages. What was one more?

Sighing, he formed the hand signs that would dispel himself, all too glad to return memory and agency and the burden of living to the First.

* * *

By the time Shun was done with Kumogakure, he had acquired an entry in the bingo book of every hidden village worth the name, and he was starting to feel again. He’d taken a similar approach to his assault on Kiri, an ominous warning followed by a cataclysm, and this time, it wasn’t only civilians that fled the village in ragged waves.

It was a messy three or so weeks. Capturing Kumo’s jinchuuriki turned out to be a harder nut to crack than he would have liked, so he merely settled for tearing down everything of any worth that they’d ever built, preferably with some of their ninja buried beneath.

He smiled when he saw Iwa’s hastily updated entry for him: they, like everyone else, had settled for calling him ‘the Scourge’, and it was strangely satisfying. For once in his several lives, he felt at peace with his reputation, with the things people said about him. _This_ time, he wasn’t wallowing in guilt, wasn’t dying a little inside every time he walked into a room as _the_ Uchiha Itachi and saw everyone try to make themselves smaller so as not to bother him.

Partly, the reason he felt so at peace was the fact that he rarely appeared as ‘the Scourge’ in public. ‘The Scourge’ wore ceremonial Uzushio battle robes and the blood and dust of his unfortunate enemies; Shun-san wore his favourite blue kimono and a weathered old sword on one hip, and his dark red hair was shot through with enough grey that everyone called him ‘oyaji’ or ‘jiisan’ if they spoke to him at all.

But the other reason, the other half of why Shun slept so well every night, that was something Inoko-san would have frowned at. He no longer cared for the life or death of his fellow man. He cared enough to give someone a helping hand when they were right at the edge of a cliff and struggling not to fall; he still remembered his manners, the things Mother had taught him about lending aid to the truly desperate.

However, though that framework of politeness and neighbourliness was still present, the fundamental feeling or principle that had supported said framework was no longer there. Men and women were born, and they lived and died according to their luck, with no rhyme or reason or order to who got the extra chances, or who was unlucky enough to meet him in the wrong mood.

He spared children whenever he could, because when you thought about it, they were only half alive, and were unluckier than most of the people he encountered when he was in the mood to slaughter, just because of how fundamentally unequipped they were to deal with his presence. That this policy meant that the ruins beneath Uzushio never really stopped being occupied was a side benefit, and really much more of a pain in the ass when you considered how little Shun liked managing people.

He only had to murder the head of his nameless village once. Which was two less times than he had to murder a prominent hidden village authority in this over-long lifetime, so. Progress.

As Shun’s inevitable death came closer, he found himself paying more and more attention to the people he’d gathered around him. He searched them out by chakra signature instead of bothering with names; he gave counsel, parcelled out one or two of his less abusable techniques, and did his best to nudge the village—his village, in a way Konoha had never been able to be—further towards the right path.

Then, when he was tired, he threw on his favourite kimono and walked out into the sea. It took a month for him to weed out all the idiots that thought tracking him out on the ocean was any kind of sensible idea, and for him to find a resting place that fit. He fell asleep, then, to the sound of a brewing storm, with wind and wave barely touching him, with no one around for miles.

* * *

He woke as a woman—no, as almost a woman. A woman prone to staring into the middle distance a little too often, a woman with a very particular, rolling Fire Country lilt to her soft, careful voice.

Not a ninja. Not a noble. Not an alpha, omega, or anything similar. Not Kotone. Just—this woman, this girl.

Ageha was his—her name. It only hurt a little, because they’d been smart last time, and had shunned learning names. _Something to keep in mind,_ Ageha thought, as she picked up her hairbrush again, _just in case this isn’t the last turn._

She’d figured out exactly what had gone wrong, as Shun. He’d had more time than he knew what to do with, so she’d put it to use on studying every seal and every theory she could get her hands on, and in the end, she’d had to stop because she didn’t know whether to laugh at what she’d found or burst into ugly tears.

In that first, miserable life, just before she brought forward her untimely end, she’d incorporated the seven turns stitch into the larger design of the seal, as both energy generator and fail-safe. She’d meant the next life to be her first and final redemption; she hadn’t meant to claw her way into getting six more useless tries at it.

She’d hoped too much that she could control what happened to the soul she was sending back in time. She’d gambled so hard, betting that she could control the when of where she arrived, if nothing else, and by the time she’d started her research, the great barrier seals and trap seals on the northward edge of Uzushio’s island had all long since faded, leaving little in the way of signs or warnings for Ita—him to take to heart.

If she’d been able to see those seals, if she’d had the time to work out how they were used, she’d never have shoehorned in a fucking cyclic energy generation pattern into anything she was relying on for dimensional travel. But then, if she’d been that lucky in that life, she probably wouldn’t have found herself in the position where a risky, untested self-made time travel seal was her most appealing option.

“Ageha? Won’t you eat?”

“Coming, Mother,” Ageha said, forcibly shelving her gloomy thoughts for another day. “I’ll be there soon.”

* * *

Living as a normal person was strangely nerve-wracking, even when Ageha could tell she wasn’t disliked, wasn’t looked down on much for her weird habits, her inability to call certain people by the correct names and so forth. She’d had less and less practice at the social niceties as her last life ended. She felt almost amused, sometimes, at the sheer amount of little rituals the people around her required to feel that everything was going comfortably.

No one had startled or frowned when Shu—when her last self had walked into his sprawling home without bothering to announce himself. No one had stopped him in the streets for a chat while he was on the way to the market. Though that last was likely because even as the smiling, harmless old man he’d needed to play to be undisturbed in the wider world, he hadn’t been an interesting or in any way appealing prospect for idle conversation.

Ageha, on the other hand, though not all that good-looking, was unfortunate enough to be young and visibly female, and looked mild-tempered enough at first glance that even the most timid young mercenary would think her an easy target to chat up or harass. Well, they’d think that for the first few minutes, and then wonder if she’d heard their catcall, and if they were lucky, it’d be busy enough in the street that the chance encounter would be over and done with.

If they were unlucky, and persisted enough to get in her way or put a hand on her, a sprained arm or a ringing head was their inevitable reward. Mother, a former entertainer whose many roles had often included stage fights and dramatic stunts, had done her utmost to ensure this empty-headed, daydreaming daughter of hers was trained in self-defence. The fact that physical means seemed to be the only means Ageha remembered to respond with was of course regrettable, but far better than nothing. Town boys knew to avoid her, and the out-of-towners either learned quickly or left before they could become any kind of nuisance.

Ageha, content by the small, well-defined life she had come into possession of, was happy to let it all drift by. Her days consisted of walking to the tiny shop her mother rented in an alley off from the main street, sweeping and cleaning and tidying and shifting around heavy bags of ingredients at Mother’s behest, and serving buns, dumplings and/or drinks to eager customers. It was tiring, mind-numbing, strangely satisfying work, and at the end of the day, Ageha would trudge home first and draw hot water for herself and her mother’s baths, eat a hasty dinner, and stumble off to bed to sleep like the dead.

Weekends were the only break in the routine, first because the shop did enough business on Saturday evenings that she and Mother rarely got to go home until it was starting to be light outside again, and second because Sunday was the day Mika, her older sister, typically came over to visit. Mika worked as a schoolteacher in Tsuno, the much larger town a half-day’s walk from here, and when she wasn’t complaining about her pack of shitty, stubborn brats, she was cursing the name of the superintendent, the principal, or one of her fellow teachers for various wrong-doings and slights.

Mika and Mother had a ritual exchange that always occurred when the usual flood of complaints had dried up. “Seeing anyone?” Mother would say, in that hopeful-yet-casual tone of all parents everywhere. “No one I’d want to bring home,” was the usual response. Or, from time to time: “We’re not at that stage just yet, but maybe soon…”

Mother never pried any further once presented with that kind of vague response, which was all for the best, given the way a certain tension went out of Mika once the subject had been put to bed in the usual manner. The only times either of them broke the pattern were the few times Mika didn’t come home whistling out of tune, announcing her presence with a brisk ‘I’m home’ and a rapid tread towards their cramped kitchen. Mika was the only one of them that couldn’t cook very well, and anything that kept her from ravaging their fridge’s inexhaustible supply of day old buns was a serious matter.

The first time all of Ageha was aware enough to watch it happen, Mika came in quietly, grey-faced and tight-lipped. “I caught them together,” was the only thing she said, before Mother dragged her into a tight hug. She didn’t really say anything else while she was there, but the hug revived her enough that she could eat all Ageha’s dango while moodily watching TV.

The second time, the news of what had happened was all over town days before Mika could finally stagger home, and none of them spoke at all. Tension gripped the entire town, a formless weight dragging down everyone’s shoulders for the three and a half days after the unexplained explosions in Tsuno. Ageha was almost, almost glad to see the familiar, sleek outline of a Konoha message runner lingering outside the office of the town elder, even though it meant saying goodbye to the unexpected comfort of having Mika there at night to run baths and warm up leftovers.

The third time, Mika came home shadowed by a tall, stooping, desperately awkward looking older woman who she introduced as her friend, Saya-san. Her ‘friend’, for all that they were standing far too close together, and Saya-san’s hand was white-knuckled around Mika’s left hand, and Mika didn’t seem to have noticed it at all.

“Come in, both of you,” Mother had said, smiling tightly. Ageha thought the dinner that followed that inauspicious introduction definitely ranked amongst the top ten most disastrous meals she’d ever been forced to sit through, even though no one ended up crying or screaming or stabbed. It just went on and on and _on_ , and then, just as they were most of the way through it, Ageha made the monumental mistake of asking how long Mika and Saya-san had been together.

Then, as Mika coughed, and Saya-san began to fumble her way through an explanation that there wasn’t, haha, Ageha-chan really knew how to joke, Mother had laid down her chopsticks with an ominous click. “Do you think I’m stupid?” she’d said, and things had only gone downhill from there.

Thankfully, Mika and Mother were the kind of people that preferred to tear everything out into the open during a disagreement; goodness only knows how horrible it would have been to be in the middle of their non-argument for days on end after the disastrous dinner. Mika, at least, would have been able to escape back to Tsuno; Ageha would have been trapped as the number one listener to Mother’s troubles.

Said troubles were just about as conventional as one could expect. Mother was upset, of course, that Mika didn’t seem to have a plan for having children ( _“Who’ll take care of you when you’re old?”_ was followed by _“Don’t even think of saying you’re relying on Ageha-chan for this; we both know no one will marry her, so don’t even say—”_ ). Mother was barely mollified by the somewhat shocking news that Saya-san (‘Sekiguchi-san’, for the whole time she was there) already had a seven-year-old son ( _“Where **is** he, exactly?”_ _“A-ano, at this time of the year, Yuki-kun stays with his grandparents in Nakatosa.”_ ).

Yuki-kun’s father was revealed to be a retired Konoha nin—deceased as of two years ago due to surgery complications, a fact that Saya-san uttered with the weary smoothness of someone long used to answering the unspoken question of ‘what happened’. Mother seemed to take comfort in the assumption that Saya-san was the widow of a respected individual; Ageha, having noticed that Saya-san never quite called Okazaki-san anything other than ‘Yuki-kun’s dad’, resolved to do a little bit of asking around the next time she got a chance to go up to Tsuno.

It was quite clear to Ageha that the primary issue Mother was having with the news of Mika’s unconventional choice of partner was the fact that she had had to find out like this. That no hints had been parcelled out to her over the years. That she had not been given leave to weigh in, to fret over the effect on Mika’s future prospects, or to begin, in her clumsy, overbearing way, to try and find Mika someone that suit. It did not help that Saya-san was neither handsome nor pretty, and had a deliberate, somewhat nervous way of speaking. That she was part-owner of a mid-sized construction company in Tsuno was offset by the fact that she was very much on the outs with her parents, and on only barely cordial terms with her grandparents.

(It did not escape Ageha that Okazaki-san’s family members were not mentioned at all.)

Still, when Mother and Mika had finally stormed off to their respective ends of the house (Mother to the kitchen to angrily clean up the remnants of dinner, and Mika to the guest room to angrily unpack), Ageha managed to salvage things with Saya-san by dint of asking the usual questions in the most manipulative way possible.

(“Ano, Saya-nee—it’s all right to call you neesan, right?”

“Uh…”

“Then, let me guess, you guys met at the school, right? Because Yuki-kun goes there?”

“…haha. I suppose that’s obvious.”)

By the end of the visit, Ageha’s manufactured cheer was wearing thin, but at least it had given Mika and Mother time to argue themselves down to a stony-faced standoff, and given poor Saya-san some hope that Mika had at least one sane family member. It helped that Mother didn’t break the usual end-of-visit ritual of offering Mika a variety pack of buns for the road. That Saya-san’s nervously avowed favourite taro buns were only four out of the sixteen options crammed into the basket was disappointing, but not the worst possible option.

(The worst possible option would have been one bun, because it would mean Mother had deliberately made a full-sized batch just so she could appear to have taken Saya-san’s tastes into account without actually having done so.)

“Look at them,” Mother said, bitterly, once the two familiar figures were too far down the street to overhear her. “They just don’t _fit_.”

And then added, after Ageha’s noncommittal grunt: “What, she couldn’t find someone a little more… I mean, you can tell the woman tries, but she’s _old_ , and she doesn’t look half as good as even you do.”

Then, after Ageha’s wordless, not quite agreeing murmur: “I suppose it isn’t the worst choice. Mika does need someone steady, and that Sekiguchi-san is definitely it. It can’t have been easy raising that boy on her own, these last two years.”

“True, true.”

Mother gave her a sharp look, but, as expected, the lure of voicing further complaints prevented her from making anything off Ageha’s obvious partiality in the matter. “I just think it’s a shame that this, this _farce_ is to be Mika’s grand romance. I knew she was heartless when she quit dancing to finish her teaching degree, but I just hoped… Work is one thing, of course; we’re not nearly blessed enough to be impractical about what we devote ourselves to. But a partner, that’s…”

“She’s happy,” Ageha said, simply, and for a few silent, slightly sniffly moments, that was that.

Then: “You can tell me, Ageha-chan,” Mother sobbed. “Mother won’t be angry if you like girls too… It’s just that it’s already hard, Mother couldn’t keep your wretched father, and with that too against you, it’ll be even harder… Not that that lout would have made much easier. Gods, he’d have drunk away all our savings, and then where would we have been…”

At times like this—which were thankfully quite few and far between—Ageha knew better than to say or do anything. All Mother wanted was to vent for a bit and be patted and hear soothing, vaguely agreeing noises, and she always made something afterwards if there was time.

Tonight, the post-lament meal was gyudon, with one of the packs of beef Mother had been saving for tomorrow’s hot pot sacrificed to the wok. They ate in comfortable silence while watching the news.

The beef was perfect, the rice was mostly just okay, and the news segment on shady goings-on following Kiri’s new treaty with Konoha was nothing special. Afterwards, they cleaned up the kitchen together and got tomorrow’s prep properly started, then yawned and nodded to each other as they separated for bed.

 _I’m going to miss this life,_ Ageha thought, that night, as she drifted off. _If, that is, I even have another life to remember it in._


	3. Interlude: Ken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ken prefers to indulge in his Uchiha fixation in a casual manner. Itachi interferes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story probably only needs a Kotone extra (Kotoneeee ;_;), but as you can see it's gonna have more!! Please enjoy Kensuke's bewilderment at the fancy Uchiha alpha who actually returns his unrealistic feelings <3

If you had told Enomoto Kensuke he would be married to an Uchiha alpha in a year’s time last month, he would have stopped and doubled over with bitter, near-hysterical laughter. Inwardly, at least; outwardly, he would have given you a small, pitying smile and smoothly changed the subject.

It wasn’t that he’d never dreamed of such a thing happening to him. He was fairly sure that all gullible young omegas dreamed of it at one point, just after their first encounter with an arrogant Uzumaki or Akamine alpha ground their first pipe dream to dust, and just before they tried to speak to said dreamy Uchiha alpha and got boring monosyllables in response.

The next step in the dream chain was to get hung up on either a Senju (for the more hopeful kind of omega), a Hyuuga (for masochists) or a Yamanaka (the unlucky bastards that happened to encounter Chie-Chan’s needlessly polite older brother at the wrong time). That Ken had never moved on from his Uchiha fixation was something he kept strictly under wraps, disguised with the sly smiles and mild flirtation he employed with nearly everybody. He didn’t discriminate at his usual bar, either; tall, dark and brooding suited him just fine for a night or two no matter what their family name was.

Going to a hotel with Uchiha Itachi had been a mistake. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until afterwards that Ken realized it. One moment, he’d been lounging in bed, luxuriating both in the sweet soreness left by a proper fuck and in the opportunity to watch Itachi-san become the buttoned-up officer step by step. Then Itachi-san had looked down at the KPMF vest in his hands and frozen, staring at it for a minute, only to snap out of his reverie and fold it with practised hands.

 _Shit,_ Ken had thought. _Is he alright?_ That hadn’t looked anything like someone thinking ‘oh, I’m not on duty any more’, or ‘hm, that’s a bigger come stain than I thought. Best not wear it.’ It looked like something terrifyingly important. Like being kicked off the force tomorrow morning, reprimanded for one too many times he’d been late for evening patrol, late because he was busy drowning in omega pheromones and fucking slutty omega nurses full of his valuable seed… “Are you all right, Itachi-san?”

“Fine, thank you.” Ken knew he hadn’t imagined that moment of melancholy only because it was easy to see the change in Itachi-san’s expression when his air of sadness drained away, replaced by a small, unreadable smile. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

That smile’s lethality was so high that they’d almost ended up fucking again, despite both being all too aware that it would make them late for both of their shifts. Hours later, Ken had found himself pulling Itachi-san’s patient history, half expecting to find some recent, devastating injury that had altered his former bright path as a bright young genius.

He’d been puzzled to find only a mundane, unexceptional history of the usual breaks, sprains and dislocations. The only thing out of the ordinary was the note about an extreme, but not debilitating yin-yang imbalance, one that had dogged Itachi-san’s stride from birth, but had certainly not managed to slow him much, if at all. There were even notes about his having participated in a study on Uzu, one that tried and failed to prove that high yin above a certain threshold was the primary factor in accelerated infantile mental development.

Ken had closed the file and rolled his eyes at himself for expecting some kind of heart-rending story. _The vest was probably just stained,_ he told himself. _Even if it wasn’t, even if there **is** some kind of deeper meaning, it’s not as if it’s any of my business._

Sadly, for the next few weeks, Itachi-san’s continued visits to Ken’s favourite bar seemed to be conspiring to make it his business, whether he liked it or not. The one time the officer walked him over to Konoha General for the start of his shift, Ken’s ability to keep up his usual carefree smile was strained to the limit.

He hadn’t been able to turn Itachi-san down when he made the offer, because Itachi-san hadn’t made a production of it. Itachi-san had just _offered_ , and looked up earnestly at Ken as he hemmed and hawed and fought the urge to ask if Itachi-san knew how it would look. Escorting Ken anywhere wasn’t going to mean anything the way it’d used to decades ago, when an alpha just walking in step with an omega meant they would soon be married. But it was still significant. It was still an Uchiha alpha paying Ken a meaningful attention, an attention Ken was trying desperately not to read into.

Rika-san had punctured his bubble the way she always did, with a pointed, pitying laugh. “Oh, that wicked boy,” she said, as Ken shrugged off the hand of someone congratulating him. “It’s always someone new at this time of year, for him. You’d think someone like that wouldn’t have such an obvious itch for pretty nurses, but…”

And then, when Ken looked in her direction, she’d added, quite as if it had just occurred to her: “Oh, Kensuke-kun, you’re new to this section, right? You’ve fit in so well that I forgot, I really should have warned you about him.”

“Oh, but then I’d have missed out on the last few nights, wouldn’t I?” Ken said, smiling slyly. “Don’t worry, Rika-san, I’m quite happy with the way things are going. There’s nothing better than an alpha who’ll see himself off when things starts to get dull, after all.”

Rika-san had smiled, her cool, unsympathetic gaze at odds with her warm expression. Ken had smiled back, and given inward thanks for his first year under the iron rule of Kabuto-sensei, who had given him a thorough education in what it felt like to be verbally eviscerated with a few kind words and an earnest smile. Rika-san’s attempt at twisting the knife still hurt, but it was a muted one. An expected one, considering who Uchiha Itachi was, and who Enomoto Kensuke was.

 _Too good to be true, huh?_ Ken had thought, on his way to his next patient checkup. _Maybe I should be the one to draw the line, this time._ Managing the end of their undefined relationship properly could even mean Itachi ending up thinking of him fondly. Appreciating, the way men like that did, the fact of their current easy piece knowing when to withdraw.

Sadly, though Ken turned up faithfully at his usual bar every other night for the next two weeks, Itachi-san was nowhere to be seen. Halfway through the third week since the last time they’d fucked, Itachi-san walked into Ken’s ward for a routine checkup, and the gaze he used to look at Ken was the same one you’d use for a stranger.

No, strike that, it was the gaze you’d use to look at a stranger that was acting a little too familiar. Furious, Ken smiled even more, flirting the way he’d been planning to do for their final time together. He felt a deep pulse of satisfaction at the feeling of Itachi-san’s gaze moving over him, lingering on his gently swaying hips.

 _I’m never going to let you fuck me again,_ Ken thought. _I wouldn’t spread for you again if you were the last man alive._

Then Itachi-san had looked at him again, _seeing_ him, and had collapsed into the world’s most stereotypical fainting fit. Ken had been too busy panicking and triaging to think of it that way at the time, but his slurred, bewildered recollection to his friends that evening made it all too clear.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t get any more involved there,” Chie-chan had said. “Deep fucking water, those Uchiha. Niisan says the jonin curse is practically a universal truth with them.”

“Right, right,” Ryou-kun interjected. “The other day, I heard Kitamura-sensei had to report this crazy older type for trying to force an evolution on her kid. Even with the clan laws against it, that that kind of thing still happens in this day and age—”

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Ken cried out. “Are we talking about th’same fucking Uchiha? The clan head’s brother’s treasured genius brat? The same guy that got carted all the way to Uzu to be doctored by the Slug Princess?”

“Yeah, well, he’s just saying, you know, there’s no telling what could have happened to him even with all that stuff…”

Ken, annoyed by the unrealistic drift to the conversation, had opted out of it by downing one too many shots, and had ended up cursing himself for it all through his next shift. Then, just as his ordeal was almost over, Itachi-san’s tall, familiar, uniformed frame had been spotted at the front desk carrying flowers. Flowers, the front desk nurse had hinted gleefully, that were most likely meant for Ken.

Ken’s flower theory wasn’t all that good, but even he could tell the arrangement was aimed at him. Or, at least, aimed at the helpful, kind, professional nurse he tried valiantly to present as at all times, like any other nurse lucky enough to be assigned to the main ward of Konoha General. Gratitude and apology and praise, he thought the bouquet said. Nothing at all romantic.

The romance was in the person holding them, in the way his steady dark gaze tracked Ken’s approach towards him. Uchiha Itachi may not have been a top-ranker in his clan for looks, but he was good-looking enough that an earnest stare from him carried extra weight. Being watched by him felt inexplicably meaningful, even if he was just being polite.

“I’ve already been to Gotou-sensei and the others who assisted with my procedure,” Itachi-san said. “Please accept my humble apologies for troubling you earlier, and my gratitude for your quick action.”

“There’s really no need for all this,” Ken said, hoping his smile didn’t come off as strained and annoyed as he felt. “I was only doing my duty.”

“Please,” Itachi-san said, holding out the flowers with such a fluid, graceful little bow that Ken found himself accepting them a beat too early. “I was told the breakthrough wouldn’t have come about if you’d been even a moment slower, so again, you have my gratitude.”

“Oh, then, well…”

Somehow, gratitude turned into trip to a moderately expensive teahouse. And then, that same night, Itachi-san quietly insisting that Ken drop the ‘san’, even as his hand curled tighter around Ken’s slightly sweaty left hand and moved it up to the traditional position in the crook of his elbow.

 _You can’t sleep with him again,_ Ken told himself, even as Itachi walked him home. _You **can’t**._

But then Itachi looked at him on the doorstep to his apartment and said, “I’m glad I remembered you,” and even though it was horribly, stupidly cliche and undoubtedly the most transparent lie Ken had ever heard—situational amnesia? _Really?_ —Ken had been unable to resist the slow, melting kiss that followed.

He’d expected Itachi to be gone the next morning, or awkward, or evasive, or apologetically avoidant, but instead, Itachi kissed him and asked what he would like for breakfast. Then made it, moving smoothly through the haphazard mess of Ken’s tiny kitchen as if it didn’t faze him at all.

 _He’s my doom,_ Ken thought, despairingly. _How the hell am I supposed to go back to my usual run of tight-lipped alpha playboys after this?_

He got through the first week of constant, nearly smothering attention from Itachi by telling himself it was a phase. He’d asked around a bit after the first night, and had found that Itachi may really have been telling the truth about not remembering him at first. Chie’s brother had declined to share more detail when pressed, a sure-fire indicator that there _was_ more to share. He would only say that Uchiha Itachi was one of the few ninja that never missed a mandatory evaluation, and that Ken should carefully consider what that statement could mean.

“It means I was right,” Ryou said, emphatically. “Clan head’s brother my ass, I bet that stuck-up father of his forced the evolution. I mean, who the hell naturally activates at two years old?”

“If he doesn’t stop bothering you, you know you can just report him, right?” Chie said, her lavender gaze heavy with sympathy. “You don’t have to do it directly, either. Rui wouldn’t mind putting in a quiet word with his counsellor.”

“I can stop,” Itachi said, lowly, when Ken threw aside his trepidation and wondered out loud just what Itachi was trying to do by showing up all the time. “If you’d rather I wasn’t—if you’d prefer not to—”

“Ssh,” Ken found himself saying, all while thinking that the use of such worried, tentative gazes should be universally prohibited to all Uchiha. “To tell you the truth, I’m actually kind of enjoying it.”

Then, much later: “You… nngh, you, to make up for it…”

“What should I do, Kensuke?” Ken had never known that someone using his full name could be so arousing. “Tell me.”

“You—hhgh—you have to court me. Properly.” Even in this state, Ken knew better than to say anything directly about marriage, even as a joke. Marriage to an Uchiha was not for him. “Promise?”

“I’ll court you for a year and a day,” was the low, amused answer. “Will that satisfy you?”

“Nhn… not just, not just that.” Ken widened his trembling thighs, groping down between their sweaty, enmeshed bodies, feeling for the aching place they were joined. “This too, okay?”

Itachi’s breathless laugh was the best thing he’d ever heard, and the worst. _I’m doomed,_ he thought, hazily. _I’m going to need a month of leave when we’re over. I’ll cry like a baby when he marries._

Then, after the shock of Itachi’s elaborate, painfully heartfelt proposal, Ken’s thoughts had slightly altered their track. _I’m going to need three months of leave when he backs out of the wedding._ _I’ll need to get Ryou to lock me up so I don’t crash his stupid traditional wedding, or try to pour paint on his real bride’s or bridegroom’s kimono._

Then, after their low-key wedding went off without a hitch, and Ken was nestled in Itachi’s arms in what he was still struggling to think of as their house: _He’s going to keel over from something in a year. We won’t even have time to think about having children. His parents won’t say anything, but everyone will know they think marrying me cursed him._

Then, years and years later, as Itachi clung weakly to Ken’s hand, his every laboured, wheezing breath a pain and a pleasure to hear: “Who told you you could even think about leaving first?” Ken didn’t like crying, much less crying in front of his husband, but the thing he hated most at that moment was how ugly he felt. How ugly he sounded. How ungrateful. “I’m older, you know. I should… this should be me. Not you. _Never_ you.”

“I wouldn’t… survive that,” Itachi said, his hoarse voice as teasing as ever. “You. My anchor.”

Ken had had to bite his tongue bloody to keep from saying anything. _Why is it that I only get this much? **Why**?_

Better not to have gotten anything. Much better. But even as Ken thought that, Itachi’s hand squeezed his own again, and as always, one look at his husband’s intense gaze changed his mind. “You idiot,” he choked out. _You’ll be the death of me,_ he yearned to say, but didn’t. He knew how Itachi would look at him if he said that. He knew it would hurt Itachi, and yet, for a moment, he’d burned to say it, as if doing so would somehow give Itachi a miraculously stimulating jolt, one that mended his failing lungs and withering body in one fell swoop and made it so Ken wouldn’t have to be alone again. “It’s fate, I think. The first thing I thought when I saw you…”

“Doom?” Itachi’s lips curled in a lopsided smile. “No.” Then, after a few more, wheezing breaths: “Not doomed. Just unlucky.” Then, when Ken squeezed his eyes shut: “You’ll live well, after.”

They’d gone one to have a one-sided argument about how being unlucky could _too_ count as being doomed, being fated for some kind of destruction. Days later, when that cherished hand finally went slack in Ken’s trembling grip, it was the thought of the one thing they hadn’t argued about that kept Ken standing.

 _You’ll live well,_ Itachi had said, careful not to make it a question, a final plea. He’d said it firmly, calmly, peacefully, the same way he’d said things like ‘Azusa will come back unharmed’ and ‘we don’t have to see your family if you don’t want to’. Like they were a foregone conclusion. Like the happy ending, the relief Ken was so sure would pass him by was something he naturally deserved.

 _I’ll live well,_ Ken thought. _I promise._ Somehow, he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand that's the end of the holiday dump for this fic :D
> 
> The next arc under construction is both angsty and plotty as fuck, so it'll be a while before I start posting drafts on meme.


	4. Turns Six through Seven: Stop and Start

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ageha departs. Enter Shinobu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while, right????? Anyway this is back now and I will have more of it in the very near future ;D
> 
> No offense to anyone named Nobu, btw. Picked that name to villify in Itachi’s, I mean, Ageha’s mind at total random.

Most of Ageha’s life went on in the same dull, delightfully simple way.

Mika and Saya-nee moved in together. Yuki-kun was brought along for a handful of exhausting visits, after which he stopped coming at all for five years straight, having been swept up into Konoha’s ninja academy.

(Mother was almost comically furious. When Saya-nee tried to argue that it would have broken Yuki-kun if she hadn’t let him go, it only made things worse.)

(“He’s a _child_! He doesn’t know what he’s really choosing! Wouldn’t you rather see him broken than _dead_?”)

(Mother’s tentative relationship with Saya-nee was never quite the same after that.)

Ageha fended off only one awkward proposal from the baker’s younger son, and was glad her romantic escapades in this life only amounted to that. Masturbation met her sexual needs just fine; the rest just wasn’t something she even wanted to think about.

(As Shun, there had almost been someone, and… they hadn’t even really come to the point of getting involved, when Uzu fell. He’d always thought he’d have the time to think about it later.)

(It was tiring, hurting that much over someone she’d barely known. She wasn’t interested in doing it again.)

Years passed. Ageha took over more and more of the heavy work in the shop, and got a little more free reign in decisions there. She tried not to feel too excited at being allowed to start a small sideline of sweets and pastries.

She didn’t hold back an ounce of pride when her somewhat bastardized recipe for custard-filled melon pan became a hot seller. By the time she was ready to feature it in the shop, she was almost sick of trying variations, and that was even with the support of her bottomless appetite for sweet things.

Ageha tried not to show how glad she was that Yuki-kun, after the not-quite-estrangement, ended up a glorified paper ninja in Communications. She nodded along to his choked rant about how all the best opportunities went to people in major clans, and how he really thought his jonin-sensei should have given him the recommendation to Intelligence that he’d so desperately wanted.

(It was very difficult holding back the urge to tell him how lucky he was that he’d gotten to the ripe age of eighteen as a first-generation civilian-born ninja.)

(Sure, his father had been a ninja too, but weekend visits and zero training before the man’s death meant Yuki-kun had probably shown up to his first day at the Academy as green as any other civilian kid.)

Ageha had her worries, of course. She followed political news religiously, taking in everything, scrying as much as she could for the hints that things might be going in an unwelcome direction. She hugged the sullen Yuki-kun a little tighter whenever he condescended to show up. She always made a point of saying a proper goodbye whenever it was needed, and forcing those she loved to cooperate with her in that social nicety.

That the first of them to go was Mother, and at an expected age, never stopped feeling like some sort of strange fluke.

(“I d-don’t know h-how you c-can b-be s-s-so,” Mika sobbed, her hand in a death grip around Ageha’s, “s-so _calm_.”)

(Saya was much more practical, but prone to hovering. “You don’t need to worry about the shop right at this—”

“It was hers,” Ageha interjected, even as she began measuring out flour for the coming week’s batch of gyoza wrappers. “It was ours. Closing last week was already enough.”)

Probably, Saya had had a few thoughts about how the shop was pretty much Ageha’s life, and had only reluctantly let her go on making wrappers that evening because she saw the activity as something that would help Ageha cope. Which was probably also why she wholeheartedly supported Ageha’s goal to see if a much more ambitious enterprise could work; some of the family’s accumulated recipes were amenable to production on a commercial scale, and the shop had become something of a mild tourist attraction over the years.

Probably, Saya would bitterly regret that sensible-seeming decision for a long, long time.

Ageha, halfway through one day’s endless-feeling factory inspection checklist, only knew something was wrong when the stress-related dizziness and shortness of breath was joined by a sharp pain in her left arm, and even then, she didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t until later, well after she’d slumped over mid-question, well after she’d fainted, well after waking up to the convulsive weeping of her older sister, that she realized that this might be it.

(Ageha, rusty as she was in handling this kind of charged moment, knew better than to give voice to the thought that her heart attack might very well be due to her awful karma.)

(She’d done things as Shun, things she knew she should probably regret. But even now, all she felt about them was a kind of stony satisfaction. That was probably worth _some_ karmic retribution in and of itself, and that wasn’t even getting into how many people she’d killed.)

“Sorry,” Ageha wanted to say, but she was intubated and fading into a depressingly familiar haze, feeling further and further from everything. She settled for giving Mika’s hand one last, weak squeeze.

_I’m glad I wrote out all my recipes,_ was her last thought. _They’ll have that, at least._

The gods knew she hadn’t left much else, nothing else that was really lasting. She’d put down her reticence as being due to the reality of her birth and her station, but she’d known, deep down, that if she’d really wanted to, she could perhaps have done something more.

She’d known, too, that if she reached for that indefinable something, it would eventually mean letting go of what she’d already had. Mother, and work at the shop.

Choosing had been so easy.

* * *

The sound—the seal was different now.

“So that was my last life, huh?” s/he thought. “I suppose I can consider some of this to have been worth it.”

“I wonder what happens next.”

* * *

Next was…

“Waaaahh!”

“Ssh, ssh now,” someone was saying, their voice choked with tears. “Ssh, please, Kei-kun, ssh.” A woman at the end of her tether. “Mother needs you to go to sleep, okay? Please?”

“Cha’kuh hurts,” sobbed the young boy that was probably the Kei-kun in question. “ _Hurts._ ”

“I know, Kei, I know,” was the tearful answer. “Just… just breathe through it, okay? Breathe.”

“It hurts…”

“Breathe for me, okay? Take it in.” The stir in the woman’s chakra was clear even from here, a slow, steady shift. “Let it out. In. Hold. Out.”

The boy’s sobs gradually quietened. There was another, almost imperceptible stir, moving almost in time with the larger, clearer cycle.

_Genius, huh._ The boy didn’t sound like he could be older than five years old. _Guess I won’t be the only one._

_Wait, can I even…?_

“He woke you up too?” The meaning of the whispered, indignant words was clear to him (her? No, definitely him) despite their slightly garbled structure. Turning over a little on the futon he was scrunched up on revealed the comforting warmth that had been at his back to be owned by a large, frowning older girl, whose face he couldn’t see, and yet… “I hate him.”

Words came to him, words he said automatically, tonelessly: “He can’t help it.”

“I can still hate him,” was the low, passionate answer. “Ugh. I’m never going to get back to sleep.”

She didn’t sound much older than the boy out there, the boy being comforted by the tired woman in the room just beyond theirs. _He_ didn’t sound much older either. If it wasn’t clear from their worn bedding and musty-smelling surrounds that they could not possibly be in some secret ROOT training ground, he would have been almost positive that was what was going on here.

And of course, the woman _was_ comforting that Kei-kun. That wouldn’t have happened in a ROOT facility.

(He tried not to think about how much more effective ROOT might have been if such comfort and care had been dispensed alongside the brainwashing.)

“Where are we?” he couldn’t help but ask, despite knowing how disastrous it could be to indicate he was missing a step right now. “I… my head hurts, and I—”

“You’re Nobu-kun, you’re four years old and I’m five and I’m Taka-chan, and tomorrow morning we’re ditching this stupid village for another one.” Then, as he stared at her, she added, in a slightly softer tone: “It’s okay if you don’t remember. It’ll come back.”

“I—who named me Nobu?” It felt distressingly wrong to be called that. The last Nobu he remembered had been the asshole trying to bullshit him—her—on packaging costs. She—he did not want to be called anything even vaguely related to that smirking, sexist, patronizing piece of shit. “I refuse to believe that’s my name.”

Instead of frowning some more (he swore he could feel it somehow, even though she was a hard-to-understand sort of earthy warmth in her chakra), Taka-chan snickered. “It’s short for Shinobu,” she whispered. “It’s you, isn’t it? It’s def’nitely you, Nobu-kun.”

And then her pudgy hand was enclosing his a little too tightly, shaking a little, so Shin couldn’t really do anything other than grunt and squeeze back.

They held hands as they slowly, grudgingly went to sleep, accompanied by Kei-kun’s sniffles and his caretaker’s increasingly hoarse voice.

* * *

The next day only raised more questions. Something about the house they’d been staying in—a battered farmhouse well away from the bulk of the so-called stupid village they’d be ditching today—struck Shin as fundamentally wrong.

He held hands with Taka-chan nearly the entire time, half because he desperately needed something to keep him from fading out of sight and tree-running as far away from here as he could get, and half because she refused to even entertain the thought of letting go of him.

They and Kei-kun seemed to be the youngest of the children in their group, who ranged from probably-six to possibly-eleven, from what he could see. There was the woman from last night (“Kiyo-san,”), another, older, sterner-looking woman (“Megumi-san”) and one young, limping, scowling man, who was probably really closer to a teenager than a man (“Aki-san”).

Other than that, there were ten donkeys and five worn-down donkey carts. That was pretty much it.

( _When the hell am I?_ Shin wanted to ask. He never did.)

(Realizing when he was brought a bitter smile to his face at midday, an expression Taka-chan blithely pretended not to have noticed, even as her hand half-crushed his own.)

They didn’t even—well, _he_ didn’t even get to see the village before they left. It was load up, futons and packs of food and clothes and water and so forth, some of the other kids whining but not being serious about it. Chakra was visibly used only once, and Megumi-san scolded Aki-san for five minutes straight afterwards for setting the children a bad example.

Shin’s thoughts, by then, were a total mess. His mind kept chasing after small, distractingly familiar tidbits ( _her full name is Takara. It really doesn’t suit her,_ and _I think I’ve climbed that tree before_ ). He had a mild, vaguely concerning headache. Looking at the clothes everyone was wearing was making him feel sick in a way he didn’t want to describe or think too long about.

( _I don’t want to do this again,_ he kept thinking, even as he tried not to think of how many levels he meant that on.)

It was afternoon, and something like ten miles away from the unnamed village, when he finally broke down and asked. “Takara,” he said, in a near soundless whisper, “are we part of a clan?”

The look she gave him was answer enough. “You’ve asked me that before,” she whispered back, much louder than he would have preferred. “And anyway, after we got done arguing over it, you said ours doesn’t count as a real one, and then Ryou-kun heard and tried to trip you, and you tripped _him_ , and then he got up and punched you, and then _I_ nearly knocked him out, and then we all had to mend clothes for a month.”

“That…” Shin bit his lip. “When did this happen?”

“Two months ago. But like I said, it’ll come back, okay? You shouldn’t worry about it.”

Shin stared at her. There were so many things he wanted to ask that he felt choked, and above all those things was the one thing he couldn’t ask, because Taka-chan’s iron grip on his hand and her determinedly cheery voice were saying he absolutely shouldn’t. But he couldn’t forget his small (so familiarly small) body and their age, and the sense that this couldn’t, it _shouldn’t_ be happening, they needed to somehow run away and maybe take all the other children with them, because if they didn’t—

“It’s only happened once to you before,” Taka-chan continued. “And it only took a day or two for it to all come back. It’ll be fine.”

“How long has it been, this time?” Shin could no longer bear to whisper, especially not when he knew the adults could probably hear them anyway, and could also spy the supposedly sleepy probably-seven-year-old boy seated across from them in the wagon craning his ear in their direction. “Tell me.”

“It’s not uncommon that it takes a bit longer,” Taka-chan said. “Emi-nee forgot herself for almost a month, last year. It’s only been a week and a half for you, Nobu-kun.”

“I said that’s _not_ —”

“Just checking, Shin, just checking…”

A week and a half, and Taka-chan was already like this. A week and a half, and none of the other kids, who were all older than him, and had obviously been doing the usual jostling and teasing and cruel little pranks amongst themselves, had yet to try anything at all on him.

(Things had been the same, the time before last. He hadn’t had patience for any of his peers, and they’d all known to steer clear.)

(Could he bear this again? Should he?)

“You’ll remember,” Taka-chan said, that night, as they curled up together under the same bench they’d been sitting on during the journey. “It’ll be fine, I promise.”

She was saying those words as much for herself as for him, and it ate at his heart, because Shin did not want to remember, did not want more ties, more expectations, more to lose, more people to _fail_ , more—

He remembered all of it that night, in his dreams.

* * *

There wasn’t anywhere near as much as he’d been expecting, in this new life’s memories. Shin had grown up knowing he didn’t fit in the world, but not understanding why, and living with an almost crippling terror of what it could mean. Yet even that fear dogging his heels, and with no Sharingan and no other powerful kekkei genkai available to hand, he’d still risen above the pack.

He had latched on to Takara first. She’d joined the caravan one day last spring, like kids sometimes did, curled into herself and glaring at the fire and eating mechanically. Her large, pudgy frame and wide-set eyes had been strongly familiar in a way Shin couldn’t put his finger on—more familiar than what came of vaguely remembering her as one of the clan’s children—so he’d sat beside her and walked beside her and done everything he possibly could beside her, and at some point it had changed to doing things with her, or, as her bossy personality naturally dictated, her doing things with him.

She, unlike him, unlike most of the other children, had never forgot herself. She learned, the way they all learned, to bear with it when someone woke up staring and nervous and closed-off and full of careful questions. She didn’t like it, but she learned, and she could always be counted on not to shy away, not to draw back and keep her distance while that person wasn’t quite up to speed.

(“It’s fuzzy every morning for me,” she’d said to Shin, once, while he was complaining about how cursed they all were. “My cycle’s shorter, but it’s still there, y’know?”)

He didn’t want to fail her. He didn’t want to fail any of them, really, not even Aki-san, who was a seriously annoying pain in the butt with the way he lorded it over the older kids and disdained to do more than grunt at the younger kids.

So on the few nights when they were well away from nearby villages, Kiyo’s careful scouting of the perimeter yielded nothing to worry about nearby, and Megumi and Aki called all the children to sit and learn, Shin put his all into repeating everything they were taught with icy precision. That his first successful jutsu was a water transformation only made his hands shake for a minute or so before he went back to working on it.

(The things he had done with water…)

He’d remembered that even back then, just not clearly. He’d remembered losing, and losing, and _losing_ until all he felt was hate, and so he’d gone on training and training and _training_ even though he knew it wouldn’t necessarily make everything better.

But that way, Shin had felt more in control, so keeping on with it was a foregone conclusion.

Having remembered everything, having once more become all of himself, Shin breathed in the slightly stuffy air of the dawn, and breathed out resolution. He didn’t make any dramatic promises to himself; he’d been taught (and taught, and taught, and _taught_ ) just how little those could be made to matter.

But he’d remembered enough of the people around him that, if he could, if it was possible, if it was safe, he would try to give back to them. They were not the worst nameless ninja clan he could have been born into, not in these times when your clan was everything. They had been doing well enough for him and Takara so far. It was worth something.

* * *

Over the next three years—slow, tense months of journeys strung out in haphazard order, their ramshackle caravan never staying in any one place for too long—Shin learned more about his clan. Which was not nameless, though his first time hearing their name rang no bells.

In his first life, he’d dug deep into the history of Konoha out of simple curiosity, then later, from feverish need. He still remembered, though he was almost sure he shouldn’t, the dry long list of the names of the founding clans and their subsidiaries. He even remembered the list of allies that had been roped in after the first Hokage brokered a marriage with Uzumaki Mito.

None of the names Shin remembered had a similar meaning to that of his current clan, though, which meant that his vague idea that they might have renamed themselves was temporarily at a dead end. And then there was also the issue that a clan of wandering sneaks and schemers tended to name themselves something a little more apropos or at the very least a bit more dramatic if they weren’t simply elevating the family name of a famous member.

But then, that wasn’t the only slightly confusing thing about the Shouheki clan. Shin was taught an intriguingly varied bag of tricks. He drilled verbally on the history and relationships between the important families in the towns the clan plied its trade, holding breathless discussions over who had just backstabbed who even while he leaned into stretches or ran through kata. He ‘learned’ how to pick locks, and got a surprisingly thorough education in how best to make sure he never had to do it.

Stealing, apparently, was not something the Shouheki were interested in becoming known for, though the general slant of the training they pressed on their youngsters would serve them well in that trade. The knowledge trade, though equally risky, was often much more valuable.

Oh, if you looked up one of their brokers and demanded the secrets of even a mildly influential ninja clan, you wouldn’t get much more than what was common knowledge. But if you wished for material facts on, say, the frequency with which the Togami syndicate (a fairly new, arrogant merchant coalition formed in Tanzaku) bribed town officials to encourage them to slow down their rivals’ permits, a Shouheki broker was who you wanted to ask.

Not that said broker would ever announce themselves as such. They weren’t the only ones seeking profit from knowing a little more than everyone else, and it would have been unwise to make it clear that there was a deeper bond beneath the ties they shared with certain helpful colleagues in other towns. And sometimes, the knowledge they learned was too profitable to merely sell on, and it was best that their customers only supposed an individual broker might make common cause with temporary local assets in order to grab a share of the profits for themselves, rather than getting up to anything on a larger scale.

Most of the time, the profits appeared to come from dull things like the children’s caravan taking on a few extra bags of corn, millet or beans in addition to everything else. All of the children knew, down to the last ryo, exactly how much all the common grains were likely to cost in every town they’d been through. Knowledge of the pricing for meat and fish was even more exact, since selling their catches in town was one of the easiest ways for any of them to make a little money.

Shin was surprised, initially, when he saw how hands-off Megumi-san was about that activity. He still held too much of Ageha, whose expectation was that everyone would turn in their catches to Aki or Megumi-san, and then exercise a little say in what was bought from the surplus. But then he remembered that his clan this time was not a handful of people, and were not shopkeepers or farmers, and he shrugged off that initial confusion.

(Takara, loud and large and unyielding as she was, had proved enough better at wringing forth good bargains that Shin always handed his haul to her to deal with. Besides, much as she complained about how much she’d been taken in whenever they came strolling back from the market, she did it in such a lively, satisfied tone that he knew she enjoyed the process a lot more than she’d ever admit.)

They were all taught to haggle, to observe, to tease out information from shifts of tone and restless movements. They were made to run laps again and again and again until it was nearly as easy as breathing, though of course they were admonished to never let it come to that. Ideally, they were supposed to stroll into a town or a village or a roadside camp on a mission, form ties with the people there that were suitable for drawing forth the needed information, and then stroll away with faultless reasons and a few new acquaintances left behind. Botching things enough that the response wasn’t someone fobbing you off with polite lies was thought to be the ultimate failure. Botching things enough that you had to run rather than be stabbed was the kind of thing that might see you censured by the clan head, depending on how much heat you’d drawn.

They were still all taught how to fight. By the time Shin was about halfway to his much-missed adult height, even someone as prone to snivelling theatrics as Kei could more or less function in a scrap well enough to dodge a few hits, land a disabling blow (most likely to the crotch) and leg it. Though of course that was all the sort of thing one was expected to do against a would-be robber with little training; against hostile ninja or town guards or (gods forbid) some noble’s samurai, the standard tactic was to run away.

Everyone was taught a handful of jutsu for facilitating that. Most of them were rudimentary genjutsu, distracting sounds and emotional nudges and how to manifest brief, visual phenomena with only a hair’s worth of chakra. Not everyone learned it very well, but there was an eerie focus to the way they practised. One that had probably been the source of Shin’s persistent worry about just who was behind all the supposedly free training, and what that shadowy someone was going to try to make them do with it.

* * *

It was near the end of a drier than usual summer that he learned. Rather than continue on their usual rough, varying loop of towns in what would eventually become northeastern Fire Country, the kids’ caravan stopped in Yasuda for a tense, stressful week, loading up on enough corn and millet that Shin could not help but worry it would slow them down.

Then, instead of trundling back onto the main road and moving on, they set up camp just north of the town and waited for two nerve-wracking days. When the third day dawned, there were two masked, unfamiliar older men sitting around the fire while Kiyo-san bustled eagerly about them, serving them tea and soup and millet while Aki stood awkwardly nearby, looking as if he wished he dared to sit beside them.

“Noriko-sama sent us,” one of the men said, once everyone was awake enough to listen. The way some of the older kids perked up made Shin go still; that Megumi-san, Aki-san and Kiyo-san didn’t seem surprised by that blunt announcement put him even more on edge. “It’s time.”

“It’s early,” Megumi-san grumbled. “It’s certainly too early for some of them.” That, she said with a level glance in Kei’s direction, Kei who looked his usual mix of hopeful and terrified. “Should we leave immediately?”

“More or less,” the man said, heaving slowly to his feet. “Ren-chan and the others are should be here with the extra carts soon enough.”

Soon enough turned into a solid three hours, enough time for Shin to see and overhear enough to ease some, but not all of his tension. The two men didn’t stand on ceremony with either Megumi-san and company, and though there was a cautious distance in the way they responded to the occasional desperately curious question from one of the other children, it soon became clear that they were to ensure the children’s safety on the upcoming trip, and primarily in the purest sense.

Minoru, the man that did most of the talking, had revealed a startling resemblance to Megumi-san when he shed his mask to eat, and Aki was on tenterhooks around him, seeking his approval in everything. The other, much more silent man aimed most of his efforts in helping the children pack at the constantly babbling Emi. ‘Ojisan’ was the word of the day, and though Shin thought that word carried an extra emphasis when Aki and Emi said it, it was clear most of the children were familiar with both men.

Takara clammed up around them, but it was clear from the way she watched them that she too was familiar with them, and just holding back out of the odd nervousness that struck her whenever she had to interact with an adult outside of certain scenarios.

(“I’m not shy,” she’d said, fiercely, that one time half a year ago when Shin had had to be the one thanking a motherly older woman for helping them pick up their scattered fruit after she’d run into them. “I’m just careful, okay?”)

To be fair, Shin clammed up around the men too, even though he’d been planning to try and ask an innocuous question like most of the other kids. Minoru, partway through looking over the folded tents he and Takara were packing away, had nodded approvingly. “Neat as ever, eh, Shin-kun? Good work, you two.”

And then he’d moved on to the next cart, leaving Shin frozen behind him, because the man seemed to know him, and he did not—he _could not_ remember ever having seen the man in his life.

“Breathe,” Takara said, soothingly, her hand an unrequested comfort on his right shoulder. “It’s like that for all of us, you know. Not everything comes back.”

“But it’s—I’ve remembered so much! I remembered you, so why can’t I—”

“You have more to remember than most of us,” Takara insisted, squeezing his shoulder. “You know that, right?”

Shin shut his mouth with a click. He did know that. What he couldn’t understand was how _she_ did. Or, he thought, with a sudden spike of realization, when he saw the other nearby children giving him sympathetic looks, how all of them seemed to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **10.20.20:** Much as I love this story, I've not been in the mood to keep plugging away at it for months now. Marking it abandoned because it is 😢


End file.
